What does Diaspora Mean to You?

Tersely speaking, the diaspora is the movement of bodies from their “native” territory to a new territory. Originally applied to describe the dispersal of the Jewish people from the territory called Israel or Palestine, it has been applied to various other populations such as Blacks, Pilipina/os, or any immigrant population under the sun. For myself, the notion of diaspora holds significant meaning. As a second generation Pilipino-American, I feel diaspora is a term that explains the nature of the majority of my identity. A good portion of my experience as an individual is based upon the interactions I have with my parents. At times there have been large amounts of conflicts and I feel it is because we have different diasporic experiences.

In describing the relationship between my family, the diaspora, and I; two important notions are that of the “imagined community” and the concept of “home.” Home, or more specifically, the feeling of the existence of multiple homes for oneself, is a marker of a diasporic experience. I identify home not only as the U.S., but the Philippines as well. This is interesting in that I have only been to the Philippines once as a child. How is it that I have an attachment to a land that I have only been to once? If my parents also identify the same two homes, how can they still consider the Philippines a home after they have left it? This question ties directly to the idea of the “imagined community,” a term coined by Benedict Anderson. The Philippines is a land that dwells within the imagination of our minds, for my parents it also dwells within their memory. It is a place that I have given value and attachment to; not only does it have a completely autonomous existence in reality, but I have added in my own ideas of what the Philippines is and created an alternate reality of what that land is for myself.

The difference between the diasporic experience of my parents and I lies in our immigrant status. As a second generation immigrant still living in the U.S., the experience of living in the Philippines is one that can only exist in imagination. Therefore, the land becomes a symbol of all the ideals that I have conferred upon it; and having a more radical, anti-colonial mindset, the country became an idealized symbol of resistance and struggle. As first generation immigrants, the Philippines exist as a completely different land of imagination for my parents. Having prescribed to pro-western colonial values, they view the Philippines as a land of decadence, a perspective which had influenced their decision to flee to the U.S. for employment opportunities. In addition to their imagined view of the Philippines, the country becomes locked in stasis existing within memory. While time flows on the other side of the globe, the Philippines remains what they remember it to be. Thus, changes that they may learn of become unsettling as they try and consolidate the home in their memory and the other reality they learn through newspapers, television, or the internet.

While the Philippine diaspora was created through U.S. imperial force and “benevolent” coercion, in the neo-colonial setting, U.S.-Philippine relations are marked by the contemporary trend towards globalization. According to Arjun Appadurai in his work Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, globalization is more than just merely cultural homogenization. He argues that there are five “-scapes” of movement that do not flow in just one direction, but intersect and flow back and forth across boarders. The ethnoscape, or movement of people, shows just that with the case of the Philippines. While Pilipina/os have been moving away from the Philippines, citizens of other countries, with interests in the archipelago, have moved in; whether they be missionaries or workers of multinational corporations. Although having moved away, my parents have also made return visits. The technoscape is the global configuration of technology, which has connected the world and has in essence made it “smaller.” This allows for communication across boarders, and has been a source of exporting labor in the technological field. While the Philippines has made great strides in engineering and technology and has had much worked outsourced to it’s shores, a large portion of the country has yet to experience it, as my relatives do not even have their own telephone line. Financescapes are the movement of global capital, and as Appadurai states, is dependent on the movement of the ethnoscapes and technoscapes. As the movement of people and labor in technology move away from the country the value of the Philippine peso is greatly effected as it has been decreasing in value to the dollar at a steady rate. The media and ideoscapes are particular subjects of interest when dealing with the Philippines. The mediascape is the flow of popular cultural and imaged based stories, while the ideoscape deals with the ideologies and beliefs. While the Philippines is known to consume American popular culture and reproduce it, sometimes more faithfully than reproduced in it’s country of origin; Philippine media is also emulated by second generation Pilipina/os here in the United States. The mediascape is one venue to help push the ideoscape, as it has been a pathway for U.S. ideology to take hold in the Philippines by presenting a certain image of the U.S. However, for second and 1.5 generation Pilipina/o-Americans, it is also through the mediascapes that radical Philippine ideology reaches the shores of the U.S.; through the news and video.